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MUSE / MUSEUM (2006-2011)
On the surface this series is "about" artists looking at art magazines; deeper down, however, the work contemplates the continuum of art and how artists influence each other. The works combine my own painted imagery with hand-rendered museum and gallery advertising layouts appropriated from art magazines such as ARTFORUM, ART IN AMERICA and ART NEWS. As an artist looking at the magazines every month and visiting galleries and museums across the country, it's natural, I think, to imagine my own work on the pages and in the spaces. These paintings take the visualization process a step or two further, engaging issues of persona and autonomy at the same time. Advertising, of course, has the multiple task of conveying nuts and bolts information while creating a certain look or "cool factor" for said gallery or museum, and then lending that look to the artist of the moment. To hand-render that information in these paintings not only acknowledges graphic design and advertising as arts in themselves, but raises questions about how that "cool factor" can actually reinforce or compete with the art depicted.
By taking ads from certain institutions that have not to date shown my work and layering hand-drawn renditions over my own images, I signal a certain complicity with the system, acknowledging that the mechanics of presentation can be as important as the images themselves. But what happens if the resulting paintings are "distributed" in a different way, for example in a book or catalog? Or if the museums or galleries whose ads I've appropriated then hang these paintings on their wall? In one regard the paintings would transform from fiction into fact. In another, it might be like looking into a mirrored room: you lose track of what's original and what's reproduction. Whatever the case, there is a certain power-taking that accompanies these appropriations, one that posits the artist not only as director but as producer as well.
While the related 1998 series NAME MATTERS presented my own name among lists of blue-chip artists' names in gallery ads, in MUSE/ MUSEUM the act of layering other artists' names (eg. Warhol, Sherman, Serra) over my own images functions very differently. The combinations acknowledge the continuum of art as well as the influence artists have exerted over each other across centuries. For years I've carried these other artists' bodies of work around in my head. These paintings, in a sense, return the favor.
Now in 2011, I have begun to focus some of the work on specific paintings by other artists, in particular works found in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, whose galleries I wandered growing up in the city. As of this writing, my "collection" includes Grant Wood's AMERICAN GOTHIC, Reginald Marsh's TATTOO AND HAIRCUT, Toulouse Lautrec's AT THE MOULIN ROUGE, Jules Breton's SONG OF THE LARK, William Bouguereau's THE BATHERS, and Ivan Albright's INTO THE WORLD THERE CAME A SOUL CALLED IDA, all employing the curatorial information to be found on the museum's wall tags. Included in this mix is the Art Institute's guidebook, THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE, as well.
Within the conceptual framework I've laid out here, one could maintain that almost any of my own images would work combined with the advertising, and so why these particular images of men and not cats, cars or Cheerios? Most easily put, it's these men who are my muse. But beyond that, having grown up in a society whose media and museums have long privileged the nude (or nearly nude) female almost unthinkingly (just ask the Guerrilla Girls), whether it's work by Matisse, Picasso, Wesselmann or (fill in the blank), I am interested in asserting or inserting this particular muse as counterpoint. As I've stated about my photo series STUDIO MEN, my goal in this work has been to reach beyond whatever stereotypes we might be tempted to assign men so emblematic of today's obsession with youth and beauty (do we think of aloofness, privilege, a certain power structure?) I get to engage these "usual suspects" on a variety of levels, taking them off certain pedestals of perfection and, through portraiture and metaphor, put them back transformed. Their collaboration makes them complicit thus in our viewing of them, but their subsequent vulnerability empowers us at the same time. Can their ultimate defense be their humanity? Muse indeed.
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